The high spending crooks on Wall Street ran a few financial institutions into the ground in the quest for millions of dollars in pay and many houses. Now they’ve come home with their hands out asking the government to bail them out.
The same government these same crooks paid off in the 1980s to remove the safe guards that would have helped prevent the meltdown we saw last week.
Senator John “I’m a deregulator” McCain and his economic advisor, former Senator, and bank lobbyist, Phil Gramm, were at the switch and leading the effort to remove government oversight at the time.
What about the free market these Reagan-era politicians got boners over? You get screwed over than you pay the price – right?
Not in the case of course. When it comes to the Wall Street elites it is all about not being responsible for their criminal actions. Kind of like Daddy bailing you out after a Frat boy bar brawl.
One TRILLION dollars is the bill all of us will have to pay for the unethical and criminal behavior.
In the text of the bill to go before Congress there is not ONE word about holding the crooks or their companies responsible for the failure and need for the buy out. Daddy arrives to bail them out.
As Glenn Greenwald writes:
Second, whatever else is true, the events of the last week are the most momentous events of the Bush era in terms of defining what kind of country we are and how we function — and before this week, the last eight years have been quite momentous, so that is saying a lot. Again, regardless of whether this nationalization/bailout scheme is “necessary” or makes utilitarian sense, it is a crime of the highest order — not a “crime” in the legal sense but in a more meaningful sense.
What is more intrinsically corrupt than allowing people to engage in high-reward/no-risk capitalism — where they reap tens of millions of dollars and more every year while their reckless gambles are paying off only to then have the Government shift their losses to the citizenry at large once their schemes collapse? We’ve retroactively created a win-only system where the wealthiest corporations and their shareholders are free to gamble for as long as they win and then force others who have no upside to pay for their losses. Watching Wall St. erupt with an orgy of celebration on Friday after it became clear the Government (i.e., you) would pay for their disaster was literally nauseating, as the very people who wreaked this havoc are now being rewarded.
Update: Put another way, this authorizes Hank Paulson to transfer $700 billion of taxpayer money to private industry in his sole discretion, and nobody has the right or ability to review or challenge any decision he makes.
The complete (though ever-changing) elite consensus over the financial collapse
Then the same week of the financial meltdown, Mr. Deregulator McCain has an article in a healthcare magazine wanting to do the same thing to health insurance that he and his frat buddies did to the banking industry. McCain has also supported privatizing Social Security – which would have Grandma’s retirement money in the stock market last week if it had happened.
In this video Senator Obama sums everything up: